Multi-UAV Placement Strategy for Disaster-Resilient Communication Network

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have the potential of being used as flying base stations to facilitate a disaster-resilient communication network. However, the optimal placement of UAVs over a disaster-affected area must be aware of the mobility of the ground users. Hence, in this paper, we propose a ground user mobility aware multi-UAV placement strategy for disaster-resilient communication network. We formulate an optimization problem to maximize the number of ground users covered by the UAVs, while also taking into account the UAV flight time constraint. Specifically, in this work, the emergency first responders (EFRs) are considered as the ground users and their mobility is modeled in the disaster-affected area. We analyze single-UAV and multi-UAV scenarios in terms of average covered users and average coverage time. We observe that there exists a trade-off between the average number of covered users and average coverage time.